Background
Chang was born about 1898, although some sources report the year as 1904. He comes from Wei-nan hsien, east of Sian in Shensi Province, an area that witnessed Communist-led uprisings in the mid-1920’s (see under Liu Chih-tan).
Chang was born about 1898, although some sources report the year as 1904. He comes from Wei-nan hsien, east of Sian in Shensi Province, an area that witnessed Communist-led uprisings in the mid-1920’s (see under Liu Chih-tan).
In 1927 he was a cadet in the Wuhan branch of the Whampoa Military Academy. The branch of the well-known Nationalist military institute was established when the left-wing of the KMT made army returned to the Kiangsi-Fukien border where Chang seems to have become the army commander.
About 1933 Chang was reported to have been a cadet at the Red Army Academy at Juichin, Kiangsi, the capital of the Communists’ Chinese Soviet Republic. By the start of the Long March in 1934 he was reportedly a divisonal commander with the Seventh Army, which formed part of the First Front Amy under Chu Te and Mao Tse-tung. When the Chu-Mao army reconnoitered with the army of Chang Kuo-t’ao and Hsu Hsiang-ch’ien in western Szechwan in the summer of 1935 (see under Chang Kuo-t’ao), Chang Tsung-hsun was with Mao’s army. But he left Mao’s forces at this juncture to move into Sikang with Chang Kuo-t’ao and became chief-of-staff of an army in Chang’s Fourth Front Army. These units did not re-join Mao in north Shensi until late 1936.
After the Sino-Japanese War broke out in mid- 1937, the Communists established the Eighth Route Army. Chang was assigned to Ho Lung’s 120th Division, one of the three major elements of the Eighth Route Army. Chang’s wartime activities are poorly documented, but it appears that he served for a brief time as commander of the 120th Division’s 358th Brigade. He was soon replaced by Hsiao K’o who in the winter of 1938-39 led the 358th eastward from Shansi into Hopeh. Chang, in the meantime, was given command of the Second Military Sub-district of the Chin-pei (North Shansi) Military District, a post he may have continued to occupy throughout the war.
When the Seventh Party Congress met in Yenan from April to June 1945, Chang was elected one of the 33 alternate members of the CCP Central Committee. In the immediate postwar period he continued to be occupied with military responsibilities. From 1946 to 1947 he commanded the 120th Division in the Shansi- Suiyuan Military Region, and from 1947 to 1949 he led the First Column of the Northwest PLA headed by P’eng Te-huai. These forces were responsible for the takeover of Kansu, Tsinghai, and Sinkiang. Concurrently Chang was a deputy commander of the Northwest PLA.
Early in 1949 P’eng’s forces were redesignated the First Field Army, and Chang was made commander of its Second Army Group. From the same year to 1952 he was also a deputy commander of both the First Field Army and the Northwest Military Region. Chang’s troups helped to capture Lanchow in late August 1949; he was appointed vice-chairman of the Lanchow Military Control Commission, but before the year had ended he was promoted to the chairmanship. Following the consolidation of nationwide rule the Communists inaugurated regional governments during the winter of 1949-50, and thus in early 1950 Chang became a member of the Northwest Military and Administrative Committee (NWMAC), which was headquartered in Sian. Soon afterwards, in March 1950, he was made a vice-chairman of the NWMAC’s Finance and Economics Committee, but he relinquished this post in August of the same year. He may have stepped down from this post in order to become, in June 1950, chief procurator of the Northwest Branch Office of the Supreme People’s Procuratorate.
When the NWMAC was reorganized into the Northwest Administrative Committee in January 1953, Chang was reappointed a member, and he also continued to be chief procurator for the northwest until May 1953. In fact, however, both posts were nominal by the early fall of 1952 when he was transferred to Peking. There, in October 1952, he was identified as deputy chief-of-staff of the highest military organ of that period, the People’s Revolutionary Military Council. He continues in this post, though since 1954 it has been directly subordinate to the PLA Headquarters, and as of the mid-1960’s he was the ranking deputy chief-of-staff in terms of length of service. In September 1954, with the inauguration of the constitutional government, Chang was appointed to membership on the National Defense Council, a position to which he was re-appointed in April 1959 and January 1965. The Defense Council was established in 1954 at the inaugural session of the First NPC. Chang served as a deputy from the Northwest Military Region to the First NPC (1954—1958), but he was not re-elected to the Second Congress, which first met in 1959. For the second through the fifth sessions of the First NPC he also served as a member of the ad hoc Motions Examination Committee.
Since his transfer to the capital in 1952, Chang has made most of his rather frequent public appearances in his capacity as deputy chicf-of staff, and on numerous occasions he has been reported in connection with visiting military delegations. In March 1953 he took his first trip abroad, accompanying Chou En-lai to Moscow for Stalin’s funeral. He received recognition for his lengthy military career when the PRC first awarded military decorations in September 1955; he was given the nation’s three highest awards the Orders of August First, Independence and Freedom, and Liberation. Personal military ranks were also inaugurated in 1955, with Chang being made a colonel-general (a three-star rank). A year later, in the August 28, 1956, issue of the Chieh-fang-chlin pao (Liberation army news), he was identified as a deputy director of the PLA General Training Department, but the lack of later information about this post suggests that he did not hold it for long.
For reasons that are not clear, Chang was not promoted from alternate to full membership on the Party’s Central Committee when the Eighth CCP Congress was held in September 1956. Among those who held alternate membership on the eve of the Congress, only Chang, Ku Ta- ts’un, and Wan I were re-elected as alternates rather than being advanced to full membership. Nonetheless, there is little evidence over the next decade to suggest that his career was adversely affected. In fact, he continued to appear at a variety of military functions and meetings in Peking and in 1959 and 1960 made two rather important visits abroad. The first of these was from late April to mid-Iune 1959 when he was a member of P’eng Te-huai’s 12-man military delegation to Mongolia and East Europe. The group visited Poland, East Germany, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Rumania, Bulgaria, and Albania, returning to China via the USSR and Mongolia. While in Albania he was given a military decoration known as the “Guerrilla Band.” A year later, from late September to the end of October 1960, Chang led a military delegation to the United Arab Republic. After spending almost a month there his group visited briefly in Albania before returning home.